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Before the Soviet Union collapsed, what was Russia's official ATC language?
In most (all?) countries today, the official language for ATC communications is English.
Before the Soviet Union collapsed, what was the official language for ATC communications in Russia and other Warsaw Pact countries? Was it Russian?

In general ICAO standards are that either the local language or English should be acceptable for ATC useage.

@JimInTexas This question's about pre-Soviet, not present day.

@DannyBeckett these ICAO standard are from long time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it was either Russian or English. I know where I'd place my bet.

There's surprisingly little information on this to be found via Google, at least in English, but according to this academic paper from Embry-Riddle titled Air Traffic Control in Russia, Soviet controllers operated entirely in Russian, at least within the Soviet Union itself:

Prior to 1991, Soviet air traffic controllers and pilots flying within
  Soviet airspace were not required to speak English and the majority of
  them spoke only Russian. After the KAL007 incident, translators were
  stationed at each of the three main control centers in order to
  assist with any controllers who encountered English-only pilots, though
  they weren’t used often (Taubman, 1987).

The cited source is a New York Times article which says that "80 percent of the civilian air controllers in the Soviet Far East speak some English" but translators (more correctly, interpreters) would be used "in an emergency", implying that the standard and/or availability of English was very limited.
If you consider the Warsaw Pact in general, then it looks like other languages may have been more common. This history of Hungarian ATC (you have to love the internet!) includes this information about the 1970s:

The regular international cooperation between Air Traffic Controls
  commenced in the seventies under the aegis of ICAO, since Hungary
  became one of its regular members. It is more than interesting that
  the Hungarian controllers had to be able to speak not less than three
  languages with the flight crews and use not more than three units of
  measurement, namely the Flight Levels and metric systems of ICAO and
  the Soviet metric system. [...] Then at last, in 1975, Hungary applied
  the full ICAO system, but the Russian language as a medium of
  telecommunication remained in constant use until 1991 when the Soviet
  military forces left our country, after the 1989 political changes in
  Hungary.

It also confirms that Russian was a requirement for ATC controllers:

Boys in their twenties with more than basic English and Russian
  language knowledge were the target as new trainee controllers.

There are also numerous aviation forum threads about Soviet and modern Russian ATC controllers, the overall picture seems to be that there was always some English spoken by ATC but it was often grudging, limited or just hard to understand. However most commenters (e.g. airline pilots) seem to agree that since the end of the Cold War, it's become much more widespread and the general level of ATC professionalism in Eastern Europe and Russia has improved significantly.

There are suggestions that Soviet ATC was in Russian.

User Codeshare  From Poland,
posted Thu Jan 1 2004
Back in the old days, as the old LOT pilots say, ATC transmissions were carried out only in Russian.
Plus there usually was some sort of agent when flying over the Soviet Union.
Also some of these 'agents' were surprised when the pilots had exact maps of the airspace from Jeppesen or other maps.

Reply #7 on that link is quite interesting!

can't confirm, but have heard similar. You'd get supplied with an "intepreter" who was really a KGB or GRU agent who was there to control you. He'd do all the talking with ATC, then tell you what to do. Pretty similar to a pilot being sent to a ship entering a busy harbour, plus the Soviet paranoia about anything foreign.


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As of 2023, why do we still not have an airplane that can be operated by a person with very little training?
In the past 20 years the following technologies reached full maturity:

Computers now have immense computation power, sufficient to process real-time video with several backup systems for a relatively low cost
High-resolution and high-frequency cameras, with better resolution capabilities than the human eye
Neural networks capable of recognizing objects and solving certain problems at a better rate than humans. Given an aerial image, a neural network could tell you the position of the plane in less than a second anywhere on the planet, for example.
Cheap sensors for pathfinding, such as RFID for close range and GPS/Glonass/Baidu/Galileo for long distances

So... what's currently preventing us from building an airplane that would be as complicated to operate as a car? Surely we have the technology to make an airplane do 99% of the work?

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I think the big reason why this hasn't been developed is money.
How much would it cost to develop this sort of airplane? We'd basically be developing an autonomous aircraft that can fly from one civilian airport to another using the same airspace as other VFR and IFR flights, and handle emergency situations on its own. We'd also have to do extensive testing in order to make sure that it's safe. I think that most of the necessary technology probably exists already, but all that development and testing would be a tremendous amount of work.
This technology wouldn't make flying very much cheaper, because most of the cost of flying goes towards the airplanes, not towards the pilots. So I think it would be very hard for a private company to recoup the cost of  developing this technology.

In a sense this is the right answer.  There's simply no real demand for it - why?  i honestly don't see that much demand for self-driving personal cars - far less personal planes.  It's interesting that self-driving trains-monorail type transport, is pretty easy to do - but it's very little used, there's just no great need.

This might be on the right track, but I’m feeling like the fact that safe, reliable, usable self-driving cars don’t already exist, despite high levels of demand and investment, suggests that greater aircraft automation with acceptable levels of safety and utility is also still out of reach.

There are in fact companies developing this technology today.   See Wisk, Xwing, Joby.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/02/26/pilotless-autonomous-self-flying-planes/?sh=1097cef145ea

I think your estimate of what commercial pilots charge is on the low side, by at least an order of magnitude. Each flight needs at least two of them, and it's one of the higher paid jobs around. They also represent at least two seats which could be sold - seats with a view out the front window might even attract a premium.

Charging per flight isn't the only possible business model. Removing the flight deck, all of the pilot equipment, and never having to worry about pilot schedules will easily be worth millions per plane upfront, plus a couple million annually.

We do have airplanes that can be flown with very little training. If you cut out all of the details that make airline flight as remarkably save as it is, a non-pilot can be put in the pilot's seat of an airliner with very little training and have a flight where things go fine 99%. Plenty of aircraft have autopilots that work uneventfully 99% of the time, and even some light aircraft have autolanding capabilities for emergencies where the pilot is incapacitated.
But 99% isn't good enough. Sensors fail. Autopilots fail. A pilot needs to be able to do everything the automation can do, just in case the automation fails. They also need to be able to competently monitor the automation and be ready to disengage it if it is acting improperly.
There are, of course, other considerations. Unlike a car, where you only have to worry about traffic in your immediate vicinity, planes have to worry about traffic that may be miles away and in any direction. Finding traffic around you and keeping a mental picture of the situation in three dimensions is not something that comes naturally, and must be learned. Anything other than perfect weather can also make the basic flying task much more difficult.

For cruise flight that would be accurate, but when it comes to takeoff and landing I don't think a non-pilot would be able to perform those maneuvers even with a CAT IIIC autoland system.

@SMSvonderTann Not with absolutely zero training, but amateurs learn to takeoff and land in full flight simulators all the time, and it's a pretty quick process.

Simple turns to a heading, climbs, descents, etc. I agree.  Not accidently overspeeding the gear or flaps, performing all the flows and callouts during a normal flight, operating all systems correctly, disagree completely.  You need to do all that for an uneventful flight, and you need a type rating in the big planes for a good reason.

I’m not a fan of this answer because it overly validates misunderstandings in the question. One huge difference between cars and airplanes is the massive differences between operating a car in a crowded parking lot versus a plane at a busy airport. A better answer would explore this and other complicated aspects of aircraft operation.

@MichaelHall Maybe the word uneventful is too strong? My point is just that the basic flying task is not difficult, and it doesn't take an ATP with a type rating to setup the FMS, takeoff, follow the flight director, and land at a destination. And most of the time everyone will walk away and the plane will be usable afterwards. Of course, even small abnormalities that would be a non-event for a properly-rated pilot could easily prove fatal.

@ToddWilcox I'll consider that and see if I can make some updates when I get a chance.

@Chris The training involved in getting a type rating is pretty much what it does take to start the plane up, set up the FMS, manage the automation, as well as more mundane things like air conditioning. The CPL covers enough basics to fly an airliner, but you'd still need to get type rated to know the switches.

To pile on to Therac's comment, a 250 hour C172 commercial pilot isn't going to be able to simply "set up the FMS" of an airliner if he/she has never used one before.  It's about a week of classes, and there are some gotchas to learn to avoid.  So, there would be plenty of "events" during such a hypothetical flight...

@MichaelHall A week of classes is something I'd count as "very little training" to begin with. I had to do more than that to be allowed to drive a car even with supervision. But in any case our hypothetical barely-trained pilot doesn't need to learn how to do everything on the FMS- just set up the bare basics for the specific flight they want to take.

Fair enough, but then there's CRM, procedures, switchology, and other plenty of other "stuff" that would also need "very little training"...  At some point that training begins to approach what's needed for the type rating, minus all the underlying systems knowledge and emergencies thrown at you in the simulator because your scenario presumes a routine, "normal" flight. I don't totally disagree with you BTW, as my own answer indicates.  Just commenting.

Short Answer:  Because it takes the exact same skills to land a fully automated plane in a crosswind when the automation fails as it does to land a manual-only plane in a crosswind.
Actually, it would be harder when it happens because your skills erode if you are accustomed to the plane doing all the work most of the time...

Why do we still not have an airplane that can be operated by a person with very little training?

The longer answer depends on what you consider very little training...
The amount of hours of training and practice to get a drivers license vs a solo endorsement, (or even a private pilot certificate) are really not all that far apart.  Consider my personal experience:

I soloed after 14 hours of flight instruction flying lightly over about 7 weeks.  If you are a quick learner and dedicate your time to it this could be compressed.  I would consider that "very little", especially in hindsight.
For comparison I couldn't drive a car solo until I had my learners permit for 6 months, had completed a semester long driver's education course, and passed a state driving test.  I didn't log driving hours, but I'm sure it was a lot more.

What's currently preventing us from building an airplane that would be as complicated to operate as a car?

Nothing, we have them now.  Many, in fact most existing 2 - 6 seat GA airplanes are actually a lot less complicated than a modern car.  If you want more automation you gotta pay for it, but even budget GA airplanes can be outfitted with some pretty nice autopilot systems for not a lot of money.
However, it almost seems like you are asking about self-flying, fully automated air taxis.  Those are in work, but if you want to just push a button and have it take you somewhere go you’d be a passenger, not a pilot.  No training required if the automation is reliable enough to be certified for flight without a pilot.
So, do you want to actually fly the airplane, or just go along for a ride?

For an example, in NY state, someone with a learner’s permit needs 50 hours of supervised driving practice before they can get a full driver’s license. That’s a lot more than the 14 hours you cite.

@KRyan, yeah, it isn't a perfect comparison.  40 hours min is required for FAA Private Cert so you can fly not just solo, but carry passengers.  In Washington State, if under 18 I think you can't carry passengers other than immediate family even once you have a Driver's license.  Anyway, they are not the same, but comparable in terms of training and experience required, which was my point.

"it would be harder when it happens because your skills erode if you are accustomed to the plane doing all the work most of the time" - also a huge, lurking problem with self-driving cars

You can fly with very little training, or you can fly with very few accidents.
Small quadcopter drones require almost no training, so that's one solution. Their operation isn't safe, but they're cheap enough to replace when crashed and light enough to not do much damage to people or other property when they crash. Cars do require training to drive, but the public demand for cars outweighs the public demand for safety, so the training is kept accessible to everyone.
Even when built to aviation standards, some of the millions of parts comprising a large aircraft will occasionally fail, compromising one or more systems. No instrument is perfectly reliable. While engineers do implement safeguards and redundancies, they still can't account for every possible combination of failures. That's where humans still have the advantage.
As for neural networks, they are less reliable than aviation-grade instruments. They aren't free from errors that humans can make, and also add their own failure modes like hallucinations (which have made it to SE). They can tell you a position anywhere on the planet, but they can tell it completely wrong if they misclassify an object.
GPS and flight automation are used extensively to navigate in IMC. Immensely useful as they are, they are also prone to fail catastrophically in the event of a sensor glitch, as seen in certain B-2 and 737MAX crashes.
Experienced human pilots are capable of spotting failure modes in flight automation systems, and addressing them in survivable ways. Not every time, but that's how commercial aviation got to the safety record it has now.
Currently, the consensus is that it takes two experienced pilots to fly an airplane safely. The same objections that apply to single pilot operation, apply to the idea of minimally-trained pilots.

"Their operation isn't safe, but they're cheap enough to replace when crashed": and small enough that the potential for damage to other property and injury to people is also small.

"since they're trained by humans" they are trained by data.  The data might come from humans, it might not.  You could make an AI that plays chess without using humans at all, just give it the rules and let it play a trillion games on its own to generate the training data.  Chess is a great example because it is very much not human biased, chess AI's play chess very differently from how humans play it. On the other hand LLM's sound human because they are trained on data generated by humans (that's the whole point).  car AI's are usually a mix of both

@eps True, I edited to specify more accurate detail about computer vision glitches.

A car and an airplane do not compare
Contemplate the difficulty of manual control, purely as a baseline.   And we're talking in the framework of automation which has failed, where the rider did not expect to be hand-driving/flying this vehicle today, and their task is to reach a place of safety or perhaps "limp home" via wisely chosen routes (e.g. minor back roads).
A car is an on/off button (these days), a forward/reverse selector, a big wheel to aim it, and two pedals for slow and fast. And that's it.  That's a pretty obvious control scheme.  An untrained person can sort it out fast. Then, all you need is a strong aversion to hitting things, and a willingness to observe and learn, especially what other cars do, and there are plenty around to observe.
OK, so you figured out the "start" and "go" levers in your airplane. Where's "stop"?  Found it, is it all right to just alternate between "go" and "stop", no worries about anything overheating, right? We're toddling around the taxiways, anything special we need to do around that BIG taxiway there?
OK we're taking off, when do we rotate? How hard to pull back? Is there a "too hard"?  Now we just use the stick to aim the nose where we want to go, right, and the airplane just sorts it out?
See, I'm pointing out here that the baseline tasks of manual flying are much, much more intricate than the baseline tasks of manual driving. And that's going to rear its ugly head as a BIG problem when the automation fails and a non-qualified person needs to get the vehicle to a safe stopping point.  Not really a problem for a non-qualified driver to limp a car to a shoulder.  Airplane not so much - too many fatal mistakes are possible, and they can happen very quickly - too quick to call 911 to ask how to fly a plane.
"But what about all those videos showing non-pilots getting talked down by ATC?"  Caution: Survivor bias. The savior is already in the copilot's seat, has been watching the pilot's moves, may have been given a few quick lessons or a few minutes hand flying (the pilot choosing them for that seat, and educating them, for just this situation)...  already has a headset, correct frequency is already tuned in, and from watching the pilot they can find "Push to Talk".  And they are flying in a world sparse enough that human ATC helping human pilots is the norm.  Now, OP's self-flying airplane won't be the only one. Put 50,000 self-flying planes in that airspace and think about how ATC works now.  Any humans are saturated by complaints about their FlyUber having no Diet Coke in the minibar.  Or you could have a common-mode failure where thousands of self-fliers revert to manual at the same time and ATC is simply overwhelmed.   That "talk them down" thing isn't gonna happen.
In fairness, automation is actually easier in some ways.  Look at what is holding back "self-driving" from being properly called that -- it's all the weird chaotic stuff that happens from sharing uncontrolled space. Airports are much relieved of that because of access control.  Airports don't have pedestrian crosswalks.  A beach ball isn't going to suddenly bounce across the taxiway with an inevitable small child in hot pursuit.  So at least for that part, we just need a special Bot-plane-only airport. Unfortunately, real estate developers are not begging the aviation community to take subdivision projects off their hands and turn them into conveniently located airports! So your new robo-airport will probably be 50 miles out unless you luck onto a long, narrow Superfund site - not convenient at all, ask Montreal if that spells success.
But just because the automation is easier, doesn't make it easy.

First self-driving "car" wreck.  Computer "driver" but  human "watcher" - after thousands of hours of watching the computer never make a mistake, the human was complacent or stunned to see the impossible.  E-devices were stowed; all indication is the human was as attentive as humans get. Source: NTSB
Humans are good doers, but bad watchers.
So of course you're dying to know: What went wrong in the above photo?  Yes, train control lets you overrun the distance you can see, but in this case the sightlines were good enough that an e-stop on sighting would've sufficed. This wound up being a harbinger.  The problem is those pesky human factors... artfully described in the movie Sully (setting aside its accuracy, if any).
Remember - the same tech that is "improving" aviation is improving cars too - we've been working on self-driving cars for some years now, and how's that going?
The pattern seems to be that computer mistakes are different - they have no sense of scale, and so their mistakes can be whoppers. They will drive into the side of a turning semi, or disregard a pedestrian, because the thing is below detection threshold or not expected.  Attentive humans do make mistakes, but they don't make large blunders like this as a rule.  And so the "solution" is thought to be human watchers...
But it turns out, humans are good "doers" but really bad "watchers".  The task simply does not suit our brains. The Washington Metro rail accident taught us this, but we seem doomed to re-learn it.  Many self-driving regimes are giving humans the job of watching for those "once every 100 hours" edge conditions and jumping in immediately.  This does not work.   Actually, the human has a cognitive crash - it takes time to shift out of complacency, realize an edge condition is happening, that there's a call for action right now, and shift from passive "watcher" to active "doer".  Why stop in civil transport? Take the Moskva - its clunky Soviet systems needed an "unblinking eye" from its operators, and didn't provide strong automation assistance like Patriot does.  Aside from organic human complacency, you also have the impulse for electronic distraction - present in several "self-driving" car wrecks and allegedly, one commercial flight overflying its destination by 20 minutes.
On the other hand, when you flip the script and let the human be the "doer" and the computer be the "unblinking eye" of a watcher, that combination works out pretty well.  It works better for the computer to say "terrain, gear" (not knowing if you're trying to land) than for the human to know the computer has latched onto too low a glideslope (a-la Die Hard II, but that actually happened).
The failure modes are much, much worse.
We already have some data to know what "self-flying airplane" failures look like.  Like the odd turn of weather that Air France 447 flew into that froze their pitot tubes, necessitating a very easy, by aviation standards response of "just leave throttle and trims where they are, since they are correct, and don't do anything crazy with the stick". Or the "intermittent runaway trim" problems on several 737s that flummoxed four trained pilots who train runaway trim scenarios in the simulator.
Of course there are countless stories of the automation doing something wacky and the pilots saving the plane just fine. But I simply do not see how an untrained non-pilot could possibly sort out this kind of computer failure that already does happen to trained pilots. What happens then, when all pitot tubes freeze up due to odd weather, or whatever other automation failure renders the autopilot unable to fly?  Do we just accept that the plane crashes?
Or do we try to get the poor passenger to save the day -- to which I say how?  I mean, normal airplanes have all the kit in place - stick, instruments, throttle. There's a radio system and headsets already tuned to talk to ATC. There are many cases of "pilot incapacitated" situations where passengers were able to don headsets, talk to ATC and get the plane down intact. I'd expect those to be eliminated for cost in a self-flyer.  Now what if there's no ATC to talk to?  What if there's no headset? What if there's no stick?
OK, so you provide all those things, how do you keep the untrained passenger from using them inappropriately? They have to understand the fundamentals of flight, such as "there is a speed called 'too slow' and you need to know what a 'stall' is and how to get out of it".  Wind shear is a thing. If they don't have stall-spin recovery training, they probably will have a bad day, especially if they are in IMC.
You could set it up "fly by wire" so the computer disables them unless it's in trouble, but can we count on the computer to know it's in trouble?  In the WMATA crash and the self-driving accidents I mentioned, the computer thought everything was hunky-dory.
The premise of this question seems to be **the automation does not fail; or it fails, you die, and that's just accepted as the cost of flight.
The problem you have then is people on the ground. There's an established FAA gold standard for how good an airplane has to be, to be allowed to fly over populated areas.  The self-flying plane would have to meet that.
A new hope
I'm thinking I should mention an X-factor here: drone deliveries.  So far, they're not used for much except delivering ordnance to soldiers on front lines.  But if "drone delivery to homes" starts happening in earnest, we will begin to collect large volumes of data about reliability and failure modes.
As this corpus of hard data is developed, it will give us a new view to the question of putting humans in such vehicles.  This may invalidate the above factors.
But here, there'll be no substitute for vast experience.  They'll have to show millions of incident-free deliveries*, or show how the accidents which do happen are survivable.
* Military deliveries notwithstanding, it turns out some soldiers are revanchist and are not so happy to receive deliveries via this new mode, even though delivery is free.

I suspect that the perceived difficulty of driving a car is in fact cultural, mostly attributable to the different rigor required in the training of new drivers.  Germany is a far cry from the US in this regard, for example.

I’m not sure about airplanes but for cars there’s wide consensus that existing self driving cars are already safer than human operated cars. It doesn’t matter whether AI is perfect, it just has to be better than humans on average. The bar isn’t that high.

@JonathanReez For cars, it has to be better than the average driver. For planes, it has to be better than the average pilot. Most pilots who aren't out for the joy of flying are professionals, so the standard is much higher. I also believe that self driving cars have the advantage of having rapidly adjustable equipment and rapidly adapting situations, where as planes take forever to accelerate or turn and by design are never in situations where sub-second reaction times help.

?  There are no self-driving cars at all.  (You could possibly argue there are some Level3/4 cars, but they're only usable in extremely limited, very slow, settings.) https://www.faistgroup.com/news/autonomous-vehicles-levels/

@JonathanReez Even prosfilaes is understating it - you don't need to be as reliable as pilots, you need to be as reliable as Part 121 aviation - the commercial stuff, which sets an absolutely bonkers bar for safety. That is because citizens are irrational toward flying safety, and demand a much higher safety bar than statistics alone call for.  And they are irrational again about self-driving anything. Have you ever seen me rant on DIY stackexhange about how humans are terrible at risk assessment and do it emotionally rather than scientifically?  That also.

@Fattie you're right. I'm not willing to step away from the term "self-driving" because the others are clunky, but I'll add appropriately sarcastic scare quotes.

@Harper-ReinstateMonica I'd argue the safety bar for flying is reasonable; the FAA even does a cost-benefit analysis for major rules. Airlines are below trains and buses per passenger-mile, but about the same per journey. It's only private cars that stand out. People are more tolerant of car crashes due to the superiority bias.

@Therac yeah, it used to criss-cross. Trains edged it out until Chase, Maryland, then aviation edged it out til 9/11 and AA 587, then trains had it back til Big Bayou Canot, and then aviation had a Really Good last two decades (and trains not so much, and the gap is now wide). But trains now, finally have PTC so they'll improve markedly. As for bus, it really depends how self-driving unfolds.

IMHO you underestimate how hard it is to drive a car and how complex road rules and interactions are. Even though I was proficient in riding a bicycle on public roads and had spent a lot of time in the passenger seat of cars it took me many hours to become okay-ish at driving a car. Flying a plane feels much more intuitive.

@Harper-ReinstateMonica "9/11" was not an accident, you cannot put it in the same bin as other plane accidents. It's like putting all the kamikaze attacks using bomb cars and trucks in the "car accidents/traffic safety" bin.

@Fattie pretty sure Tesla's so-called "full self driving" capability would be a level 3 and is available to the general public, and some of the driverless cars being tested would be level 4 (but are not available to the public)

@Lorenzo Avoiding that debate is why I mentioned AA 587, which kinda moots the point.

@user253751 BART agreed with you. They used very similar plant for their system, but added a supervisory control system that ran on, I'm told, three Apple II's.  Talk about duct tape, but no, the hardware was up to the task IMO. Based on conversations with people I know from BART, they had several woulda-been accidents but for that system. Aviation is no stranger to duct tape anyway... AA 191; worst accident in the US, AA 587 being #2 (even if you count all four 9/11 planes as one accident).

@user253751 That was the state of railroad signaling at the time. Semiconductor logic was not a thing. I realize it looks like stone knives and bearskins in the modern always-connected age with embedded computers everywhere.

@Michael edited to clarify that we're talking in the context of OP's question, which is about the difficulty of making self-driving planes accessible to the unqualified public.  Agreed with your point that becoming a fully qualified and licensed driver is difficult (much like becoming a licensed pilot)... but I'm ramping up to a point of the unqualified person being suddenly required to hand-fly or hand-drive today.  Yes, we have documented cases of that going well (caution: survivor bias) when they are able to access ATC... but what if they didn't?

@Esther - Tesla specifically has almost nothing.  "In a statement addressing the US recall, Tesla declared its technology is a 'Level Two' semi-autonomous driving system – not the more advanced 'Level Three' system which is already being developed and rolled out by rival car-makers." (you can easily google). Level3 systems are in research (not with Tesla - who are useless) and are possibly 50 years away

(Almost everyone seems to think Ford has the best auto-driving tech currently. Just hop in one of the electric mustang thingies to check it out. Tesla have like "three programmers" tooting around with auto-driving,, the major massive car companies are wildly outspending them - and achieving very little so far.)

One aspect is WHY people fly GA aircraft. Light aircraft are a pretty silly way to travel, if just travel is the goal. Apart from anything else they generally do not have a toilet!
So for most people flying in that size aircraft the reason is because they WANT the experience of flying themselves, or they are doing something out of the ordinary where flying is the only option (bush flying, law enforcement/emergency services).
Aircraft like the Cirrus SR22 are poking this space from one end in terms of assistive smarts, and the emergency service end is upgrading to allow already skilled pilots to operate into more extreme weather/environments.
Merging these two would get you a light aircraft that in good weather could fly itself around specially configured airports (since ATC needs to be able to talk to your autopilot) and might even be allowed cross country on pre approved routes but would not expect them to be allowed near/over urban areas or into actually remote regions.
Neither of these market sectors are after something so limiting so the already small GA manufacturing market has not spent the money to certify the hardware then jump through the relevant regulatory hurdles.
Further narrowing the pool of potential buyers would be that regulatory approval for flying without a certified pilot onboard almost certainly involves ATC having a kill switch (hopefully involving a parachute!) to prevent these vehicles becoming a hazard to others.

"The SR22 series has been the world's best-selling general aviation (GA) airplane every year since 2003" ... I had absolutely no idea that was the case!

Amazing reading .. https://www.cirruspilots.org/Safety/CAPS-Event-History

Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22#Safety_record it is relevant to note: By the end of 2013, the accident rate had been reduced to a fatality rate of 1.01 per 100,000 flight hours. This was attributed to better training, particularly in use of the ballistic parachute system., in particular "better training".

Here in Austria you can become a glider pilot at 16 years¹. You only need 15 hours of flying time (10 of those with teacher) and 45 landings. For motor gliders you need an additional 20 landings and 10 hours of flying time.
Compare that to a driver’s license: You need 18 “sessions” of training (or only 11 but then have to drive ≥1000km with a supervisor e.g. your parents) plus first aid course. Then after you have the license you need 4 additional training sessions and have to take a safe driving course.
I’ve only flown a motor glider for an hour with a teacher out of curiosity, so I’m far from experienced. I don’t see how modern technology (apart from a GNSS device) could make flying a small plane any easier unless it’s fully automated and you basically just enter your destination airport. Flying is inherently three-dimensional which makes it more complex. But in my experience it’s really not that different from flying an oldschool RC plane or helicopter (those are actually damn hard to fly!).
From what I’ve seen of larger aircraft (e.g. Boeing 737) they do seem to have an obscene amount of controls and I bet a good user interface designer could optimize this a lot without compromising reliability or features in any way.
¹ training can start at any age, but you can only get the license at your 16th birthday or later

It might be worth re-reading the question and in particular the last line of the about 'having the aircraft do 99% of the work', and see if you can edit your question for how your motor glider experince would have been different if 99% of the work had been done by the glide. This is a good answer, just for a slightly different question. Re the fourth para graph recommend a read of https://aviation.stackexchange.com/q/2873/60886

I bet a good user interface designer could optimize this a lot without compromising reliability or features in any way Only to a very limited degree. A good part of the best (== safest) UI for critical systems is quite the opposite of what works well for low-level, non-critical systems. Multiple menus to get to key controls? Not good in an emergency. All switches look and feel the same? Not good in an emergency - you want different key pieces to look and feel different so that you are less likely to accidentally hit the wrong switch. Hide the circuit breakers? Not good in an emergency

where you need to turn off a system that is causing problems (interference, fire, etc.) Plus a lot of stuff that is now on the main "glass cockpit" screens needs separate backup displays for the 0.01% of the time when that main screen is unavailable but you still need to fly the plane. A car can bend more of these "rules" because even at 75 MPH you can usually pull over to a safe stop in under a minute and figure it out (reboot or wait for AAA, etc.) safely at the side of the road - that doesn't work in an emergency at 30,000 feet.

Many good answers with a lot of different perspective. I'll tackle a very peculiar and abstract aspect: potential damage.
Harper already mentioned in his answer that the failure modes are much harder. I want to focus on that specifically from a basic physics POV.
When you crash with a vehicle (i.e. come to an abrupt stop) what is causing the damage, both to the vehicle and to the obstacle, is the mechanical energy dissipated in the collision (let's neglect for a moment possible fires and explosions due to the fuel).
For a car the energy is essentially kinetic, since the potential gravitational energy is usually not involved (the crashed car usually remains at the same distance from ground, unless it falls down a cliff or something like that).
A plane moves in a further dimension and by flying higher it increases its potential energy. When crashing to ground the potential energy that was accumulated by flying up will be also dissipated (technically it would be converted to vertical kinetic energy during the fall).
Keeping in mind these two formulas:

Kinetic energy: $ E_k = \frac 1 2 m v^2 $
Potential energy: $ E_p = m g h $

where $m$ is the mass of the vehicle, $v$ its horizontal speed (we will assume the plane is flying horizontally before beginning to fall), $h$ is the flying height (distance from ground) and $g$ is the gravity acceleration ($9.8m/s^2$).
let's put some numbers into this problem and let's compare a car versus a small plane of the same mass and flying with a speed equal to the speed of the car:

v = 100 km/h = 28 m/s
m = 2000 kg
h = 1000 m

We get for the kinetic energy of both vehicles:
$$
E_k = \frac 1 2 \times 2000 kg \times (28 m/s)^2 = 784 kJ
$$
Whereas for the potential energy of the plane:
$$
E_p = m g h = 2000 kg \times 9.8 m/s^2 \times 1000 = 19.6 MJ
$$
So the plane has a surplus of "destructive energy" that amounts of its potential energy, and that energy surplus is way (more than 10 times) higher than the "destructive energy" of a car.
So the damage it could do when crashing will be more than 10 times worse (in this extremely "spherical cow" simplified scenario).
Therefore the risk of allowing an untrained person to pilot a plane when something goes wrong in the automated system is literally orders of magnitude higher.
This is something probably any sane legislator would prohibit, even if someone would be willing for paying for its costs (huge risk/benefit ratio).
EDIT
Thanks to Peter Cordes for spotting a dumb calculation mistake in the end conclusions (I should avoid posting late at night :-).
He pointed out a couple other issues with my analysis, with which I don't agree. Not because they are not relevant, but because they are well out of scope of this answer.
I didn't want to make an accurate risk analysis of a real scenario (other people answered in that direction already, and I'm not really an expert of aviation risk analysis), I just wanted to take another, more abstract, route using very basic physics to show that what the OP envisions has an intrinsic order of magnitude increase in damage potential.
Of course the actual risk assessment should be done on more realistic scenario, including the average weight of an aircraft that could realistically be fitted with such an advanced system (I used the same weight of a car, which for a plane corresponds probably to a bottom of the line small aircraft), danger coming from the residual fuel ignition, air drag and so on.
Moreover, note that I focused on the damage potential, not on the actual risk of an accident happening. Of course in a detailed analysis the estimated risk should be compounded with the potential damage. My gut feeling is that overall the result would be worse (i.e. there would be even less incentive to let untrained persons pilot "automated planes"), but I could be proven wrong by a better real-world analysis

With the exception of intentional acts such as 9/11, when was the last time a plane crash caused a lot of damage on the ground?

@JonathanReez You didn't ask for records, but for reasons why one wouldn't want untrained pilots piloting "autonomous" crafts. You made the comparisons with cars. Each years tens of thousands of "untrained" drivers crash into something. This is a risk assessment analysis: the potential damage should be compounded with the enhanced risk of an untrained pilot to not recover from a system failure. Moreover, avoiding a costly and difficult training would allow more people to fly, increasing the risk.

You're ignoring air drag during descent from 1000 m altitude.  A lot of that potential energy is dissipated in the atmosphere, even in a worst-case failure mode where the AI pilot goes into a vertical nose-dive (and the speed doesn't tear the plane apart into multiple lighter pieces before impact).  More realistically, light aircraft speeds could be maybe 2 to 4x highway speeds.  Like 200 knots is 370.4 km/hour, and that's fast for a light aircraft (Cessna 172 V_ne is 182 MPH).  So 4x to 16x the kinetic energy for the same mass, over a wider area (wings instead of just the car's nose).

(Another light aircraft mentioned in another answer, https://cirrusaircraft.com/aircraft/sr22t/ SR22T has a Vne of 205 kts indicated.  (Its max cruise of 213K TAS is at higher altitude; the max normal-operation IAS is 176 kts).  So we're still in the ballpark of 10x the energy of a car crash, not 10000x.  Obviously a vertical dive ground could exceed Vne, and the wings probably wouldn't rip off or the structure break up until some higher speed, especially if an autopilot isn't even trying to pull out of the dive.

Wait a minute, 19.6 MJ is 25x the energy of 784kJ,  not 10000x.  19.6 / 0.784 = 25.  So that corresponds to an impact speed of 5x as fast as a car at highway speed.  (And is the speed you'd reach falling from rest from 1000 m without air resistance.)  So that's 500 km/h = 269 knots, barely plausible as a worst case for a light plane.  (At sea level, true air speed is about the same as indicated, and we can assume vertical wind speed is negligible.  Crashes at higher-altitude terrain have lower IAS for the same impact energy, less drag.)  At sea level, 500 km/h is Mach 0.4

@PeterCordes Ouch! Thanks for spotting that calculation error. Brain fart there. I should stop posting late at night. :-) It's still 25x the energy, though. As for the other objections, I didn't want to model the events accurately (I didn't even take into account the possible effect of the car pilot using the brakes). My attempt was a very brutal approximation to show that there's an additional factor that increases potential damages. I even used a very conservative estimate for the weight of the plane. I'm not an expert, but 2000kg is quite a small aircraft (4 seat Cessna or so?). ...

@PeterCordes ... An average aircraft with all the electronics the OP envisions could be well a bigger plane (not because of the electronics, ofc, but because you wouldn't fit a 4 seat Cessna  with a "supercomputer" worth the same cost of that plane). Moreover I didn't even try to envision the worst scenario, i.e nose diving at full power with tanks full. Mine was just a "spherical cow approximation". I'm sure that if we went for real-world worst possible scenario for the average aircraft the potential damages could well be higher.

The 1000 m altitude seems totally arbitrary, and ignoring air resistance + starting velocity before it "falls out of the sky" only happens to come up with a speed that's at the high end of plausible, maybe balanced by a low mass estimate.  So yes, higher collision energy, but probably not qualitatively different for most things you could run into.  Maybe more serious structural damage to houses, especially coming in higher up where they can tip things over or plow into the structure through weaker upper levels, not hitting strong foundations?  But that's a separate argument than energy.

For typical car mass, a Honda civic is about 1300kg.  A Cessna 172 max takeoff weight is 1160 kg.  https://pilotteacher.com/how-much-do-airplanes-weigh-with-20-examples/ has 20 examples, with the bottom 5 being GA planes, 2000kg at most for a 5-seat Diamond DA50 RG.  Above that, a 7-seat twin turbo Beechcraft 4500 kg.  Pickup trucks carrying a heavy load can be much heavier, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Super_Duty says the F-450 has a max gross vehicle weight up to 16 000 kg.  (That's like a light towtruck, bigger than a normal person would have as a private vehicle, though.)

@PeterCordes Yes, 1000m was arbitrary but I considered a worst case scenario for a very small aircraft. I'm not an expert, but I guess bigger planes like the ones a completely automated system would be common, would fly higher on average. After all a 747 can well cruise at 10km, so a 2-3km cruising height for a middle of the range aircraft is not unlikely.

@PeterCordes And yes, there are bigger an heavier road vehicles, but those are driven by trained drivers usually (at least in Italy: here you have to get a special license to drive any truck weighing more than 3500kg).

Air resistance means that ground impact energy doesn't scale anywhere close to linearly with cruise altitude.  But just for the record, cruise altitude doesn't scale as a function of plane size either!  It depends how far you're going (whether it's worth it to climb higher for faster and more efficient cruise in thinner air), but I think general aviation with unpressurized cabins will stay below FL100 (about 3.3km), and with piston engines (especially without turbochargers) https://pilotworkshop.com/tips/flying_cruise_altitude-04-22/ says 7000 to 8000 ft (2.4 km) is good for efficiency

@PeterCordes Sorry, but I think you're missing my point. I said repeatedly that I didn't mean to make an accurate analysis. My analysis has a lot of approximations and arbitrary (but reasonable) choices for numbers. The kind of approximations you do in basic physics (I said that at the start of my answer). I would love to see an answers that makes an accurate analysis, taking into account all the variables averaged over the possible range of aircrafts and flying conditions, but I guess it would take an enormous amount of time and it would produce more than single-page report.

I'm not disagreeing with your basic point that collision energy is maybe one order of magnitude higher than a car at highway speed.  I think my point was that any effort put into refining the inputs to this back-of-the-envelope gravitational potential energy calc would be better spent refining the method (plausible airspeed at impact, because scaling linearly with higher altitude isn't how plane crashes work.)    Another interesting factor is that houses and other things interesting to hit are often far away from 100km/h highways (a few hundred metres of grass), but planes can hit directly.

@PeterCordes I agree with that. That's why I posted my answer. It was the most basic answer with scientific reasoning that I could think of. My point was that even with the most crude model you can rationally assess that a plane accident can cause much more damage than a car crash, so you need better training, not less. Automation can help improve safety only if we don't increase other risk factors. If you trade automation for worse training you won't get any benefit.

A couple of issues I haven't yet seen mentioned:

If the entity (automated or human) piloting an autonomous land-based vehicle develops a fault that would preclude continued safe operation, the vehicle can generally be brought to a safe stop fairly quickly.  Airborne vehicles, however, often cannot land safely without minutes' if not hours' notice.  Thus, a fully-autonomous air vehicle would need a level of safety and redundancy far beyond what would be practical for a private vehicle.

The number of airplanes presently in the sky allows enough distance between them that a pilot would generally have many seconds advance notice of any potential collisions, which is important because it will generally take multiple seconds for an airplane to significantly alter its trajectory, or to re-establish a desired trajectory if it is disrupted by turbulence.  Even if one were to try to divide the airspace into a precise set of paths in 3d space, the number of aircraft that could be safely airborne over a square mile of land area would still be a small fraction of the number of cars that can occupy roads on a square mile of land.

If the cost of an autonomous flying vehicle were to fall too much below the cost of using a conventional aircraft and hiring a pilot, it would be necessary to impose taxes and fees to limit the number of flying vehicles, making it impossible for flying in an autonomous vehicle to be much cheaper than flying in a piloted one.

There’s always a safe (for others) way to land a plane. Just crash it into the closest empty spot of land and you’re done. Even if you’re flying over NYC such spots are at most 5 minutes of flight away. The operators of such flights would assume all risk and that’s it.

@JonathanReez: Designing an air-traffic-control system to accommodate the possibility that any aircraft might need to make a no-notice emergency descent would severely limit the achievable traffic density, and even then the time required to make a "safe: emergency landing in an aircraft would, for any level of "safety", still be at least an order of magnitude longer than would be needed in a road vehicle.

@JonathanReez: You're assuming a level of control that is not "always" available (especially because contemplating crashes, we are talking about emergency situations in the first place).

Yes, there are airplanes that, from the regulations point of view, can be flown with very little trainig: the starting ultralight class, with weight and performance limitations, does not require a pilot license, nor an aircraft registration.
You build it, jump inside, and are allowed flying.
You better read about mechanics of flight and basic aircraft handling before this, and fly only in days of 'sun and flies'
Blessings +

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text:
How does the glide ratio change with velocity in a glider with air brakes deployed?
I'm interested in how the glide ratio steepens when increasing velocity, starting from the best slope (best L/D) velocity, in a high drag configuration (air brakes fully extended on a glider).
I've seen several graphs of how L/D changes with AOA for various powered aircraft (and not in a high drag configuration), but couldn't find a relevant one.
Will be happy to see a L/D vs AOA graph and/or a sample polar in clean vs dirty configuration.

One good graph to answer the question would be a speed polar curve with and without airbrakes deployed

@Manu H  since an airbrake is parasitic it might drop Vbg down a few knots, which is why flaps are widely used, since they also lower stall speed.  Since the airbrake is mainly used to either steepen glide at approach speed or slow the aircraft after touchdown I'm not seeing any other application.  The L/D graph would simply show similar lift with much more drag, maybe a little more as a flap, a little less as a spoiler.

@RobertDiGiovanni What I meant is that it should be nice to see polar modification. When I learned to fly a glider, seeing this modification with balasts as helpful, I think the same with airbrakes could be interesting. The polar show more than just speeds for max L/D ratio or min V/S.

@Manu H definitely a legit question that could be tested with a variety of drag increase systems.  Would enjoy developing data points for comparison.  Amazing how much of this validates good old flaps.

This can be easily answered with a spreadsheet. Start with speed $v$ going from 20 m/s to 50 m/s. Add a column for the zero-lift drag coefficient and keep in mind that the increasing Reynolds number will change that value over speed, like that: $$c_{D0}=c_{D0_{Ref.}}\cdot\left(\frac{v_{Ref.}}{v}\right)^{-0.3}$$
I picked as reference values $c_{D0_{Ref.}}$ = 0.01 and $v_{Ref.}$ = 25 m/s. Adjust as required.
Next, add a column for the zero-lift drag coefficient with speed brakes deployed and add a constant value. I picked 0.015 for the example plot below.
Now we need to add induced drag and start with a new column for the lift coefficient $c_L$. Since weight does not change with speed brake setting, one will do for both configurations:$$c_L=\frac{2\cdot m\cdot g}{\rho\cdot v^2\cdot S}$$
I used 350 kg for the mass $m$, 1.225 for air density $\rho$ and 10 m² for wing area $S$. The induced drag coefficient $c_{Di}$ will be $$c_{Di}=\frac{c_L^2}{\pi\cdot AR\cdot\epsilon}$$
My sample glider has an aspect ratio $AR$ of 20 and an Oswald factor $\epsilon$ of 0.98. Again, adjust as required. For extra correctness you might want to add an extra column for the real-life lift coefficient with beginning stall. Keep the "clean" lift coefficient for induced drag but plot all drag coefficients over that extra column where the lift coefficient grows less than the linear value once it is above the threshold where flow separation starts on the wing, say 1.25. Now your speed will not be correct for lift coefficients above that threshold, but your induced drag will become very realistic.
Now add another column for induced drag with speed brakes deployed. In oder to model the distorted lift distribution over span with speed brakes, reduce the Oswald factor to maybe 0.7. Add both drag coefficients for the total drag coefficient: $$c_D=c_{D0}+c{Di}$$
The result should look something like that. The index wF is for the configuration with speed brakes deployed:

The glide ratio E is the ratio $\frac{c_L}{c_D}$ and plotted on the right Y axis. Note that the best glide is cut almost in half and moves from $c_L$ = 0.7 to about $c_L$ = 1.0 for speed brakes deployed. I did not add the extra drag at high lift, so your result might look slightly different.

Since flaps increase lift coefficient and spoilers decrease lift coefficient, they surely affect the graph of sink rate versus airspeed somewhat differently, don't they?

@quietflyer: When I wrote "flaps" I meant speed brakes. Thanks for spotting this – Corrected. Regarding lift loss: Yes, AoA will be a bit higher with speed brakes, but lift will not change.

I don't think we have the same definition of "easily" :) . After reading the whole answer, it seems easier but I still won't call that easy (maybe I should reread again and make the described computations by myself to find it easy)

@PeterKämpf this is very interesting, but how does this answer the question? How can I understand from the graph the change to L/D with change in velocity? I suppose the L/D vs AOA (not L vs D) or a polar (at least for a very dirty configuration) could give a good idea for the how sensitive the slope is to changes in airspeed.

@GJ: Lift coefficient changes with velocity, so you need to correlate both. Since I do not know the mass of your glider, you need to do that yourself. Generally, the faster you fly the more L/D moves down from the optimum. Due to the high zero-lift drag and high aspect ratio this optimum is very close to stall speed for a glider with speed brakes out.

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text:
Why are bird strikes on approach or landing not as common as on takeoff?
I've heard about lots of bird strike incidents that occured during a takeoff roll or the early phase of takeoff climb but hardly heard of bird strikes on approach or landing. Are bird strikes much less common on approach or landing than on takeoff or initial takeoff climb? If they are, why is it?

@pete secondary to that, if a plane suffers a bird strike on take-off, it may change it's plans and land, very noticeable.  If a plane suffers a bird strike on landing it's still going to land, and the passengers may not even notice.

Its surprising that bird strikes happen even at an altitude of 37,000 ft.

@Pete not necessarily.  Transport-class planes generally are unable to glide at the standard airport glide-slope!  If they have a double engine failure on final approach, they will fall short.  British Airways pilots did some serious pilot-fu to get the only mechanically related hull loss of a 777 to crash inside the airport perimeter.  Boeing doesn't make engines.

Checking AV Herald you'll see bird strikes are a monthly occurrence. and deer/caribou/moose strikes are semi-annual. I wouldn't rely on it for statistics as I think it's one guy who gleans the news each day for airline related stories.

@Bageletas All accidents and incidents are officially reported and the reports are shared by the regulatory authorities (FAA etc). The AV Herald doesn't have to "glean the news each day" if it has access to those official documents. Usually, the initial report is available within 24 or 48 hours of the incident occurring (though if the initial report triggers an investigation, the final report can take much longer of course).

Flying deer/caribou/moose strikes are rather uncommon. :-)

I've heard about lots of bird strike incidents that occured during a takeoff roll or the early phase of takeoff climb but hardly heard of bird strikes on approach or landing.

This is always a dangerous thing. Only because you hear more bird strikes that occur on takeoff, it does not mean there are more at takeoff.
I found, for example, this report about bird strikes from the year 2000. It says:

[...] 38% of the bird strikes occurred during take-off
and climb, and 56% during approach [...]

That means there are more bird strikes during approach than on takeoff. I assume things haven't changed a lot since then.
This question is even answered in the Wildlife FAQ Section of the FAA:

Q: Do most bird strikes occur while in flight, at takeoff, or landing?
A: About 60% of bird strikes with civil aircraft occur during landing phases of flight (descent, approach and landing roll); 37% occur during take-off run and climb; and the remainder occur during the en-route phase.

A more specific statistic:

Source

Possible reason for subjective perception of bird-strikes happening more often during departure
I thought a little about it and came to following possible reason: After a bird-strike on final, the pilots will continue landing. It would be unwise not to land immediately. For the passengers it will look like a normal landing. If the bird damages the engine, there is only a small change of sound, because the engines are running very low.
However, when a bird-strike occurs while taking off, there is immediate action taken by the pilots. And because the engines are at or near full thrust, the sound of a dying engine can be perceived by the passengers. Last but not least, a departing aircraft has a much higher speed than a landing one, which means more damage.
So, for newspapers, a bird-strike at take-off is more dramatic and drama sells.

More damage to the plane than a bird-strike on final
Passengers not reaching their destination
Dramatic passenger interviews about their "near-death-experience"

A newspaper is not interested in a bird-strike on final, where everything went fine and no passenger noticed anything.
To support my theorem, I googled "bird strike" and clicked on the "News"-tab. I looked through every article that had to do something with an bird-strike incident. 5 out of 6 articles were about a bird-strike on take-off. That's over 80%.

I would assume that this is correlated to the time spent in lower altitudes where birds are more frequent. If the initial climb rate after take-off is higher than the usual sink-rate during approach, the aircraft will spend less time in lower altitudes in climbout than during approach.

@nabla Good thought!

Thank you for the information. Do you happen to have access to the number or percentage of bird strikes that occurred on a short final? I think the bird strikes on that phase of flight is most dangerous but I've never heard of a single case of that in my life.

@lemonincider No, sorry, I couldn't find information about this. But I have to agree, that I think most bird strikes happen on short final. I guess there are less news about this because it's not very dramatic.

Having seen that graph, I now want to ask a question about the dangers of pie-chart strikes in different phases of flight...

I think bird strikes on approach would be more common also because, at least in GA aircraft, the approach is quieter than the takeoff.  A full power climbing aircraft would be much louder, giving birds more warning.

Even with these, statistically you still have to wonder why take off incidents are so relatively high compared to landing, like 50%, especially when you compare loiter times at the altitudes involved which is probably below 10%. One has to wonder if the funnel of air sucked into the engines running at max speed during takeoff has a tendency to draw birds into the engines too, more so than in approach where the engines are throttled back. However, effects would be much less significant and presumably controllable since you are already set up to land and presumably have the correct fuel weight.

Also, the reporting could be due a bird strike on approach being much less dangerous than one on take off. Firstly, the aircraft is facing towards the runway, so it doesn't need to manoeuvre. Secondly, the aircraft is reducing speed, rather than trying to gain it, so an engine ingest and shutdown isn't going to be such a problem,

"Last but not least, a departing aircraft has a much higher speed than a landing one, what means more damage." This is not necessarily true, especially during the takeoff run and initial climb-out. Piper recommends 60 mph as a takeoff speed for the Cherokee, while approach speeds are generally quite a bit faster than that, right up until the flare. You spend much longer at or below 1,000 ft. AGL in an approach/landing than in a takeoff, though, and birds tend to be at lower altitudes.

If I was a bird, I'd hear the aircraft taking off, and get out of the way. On landing, however, the engines aren't running as loud so it would easier to get caught from behind.

Have to also add.. a bird-strike when the engine is at take-off max-rpm is far more destructive to the engine. It's not so much what the bird does.. it's how much the engine tears itself apart. More RPM = more catastrophic failure per unit initial damage.

@PJNoes  good point - also perhaps birds pay more attention to things coming up from below, than things descending from above ?

@nabla You are ignoring the fact that if the plane is on the ground before takeoff, it can wait for the airport ground crew to disperse the birds. If it is on landing approach that may not be an option (hitting a bird is usually a smaller problem than hitting the ground crew's vehicle!) and in any case a birdstrike during a low-level pass over the runway at full engine power when going around is a higher risk situation than a strike while landing.

I think it may help that, when you say "bird strike on takeoff," the average person immediately thinks of US Airways 1549.  I'm not aware of any sufficiently recent and high-profile counterpart for bird strike on approach/landing.

If its true that birdstrikes are more common on landing, a possible reason for this could be noise.
Aircraft taking off at 100% power are making a lot more noise than an aircraft on final at or near idle. Birds flying through the air may not hear an idling aircraft coming from behind. Keep in mind that a bird flying through the air at 30 or 40 knots has a lot of wind noise around its head, (similar to sticking your head out the window of your car), so unless the aircraft is making a lot of noise (such as during take-off) the bird may not turn its head to see the 737 approaching from behind.

Imagines a sparrow "turning its head" and seeing a 747 "approaching"

@tar me thinks a sparrow would go through without even a hiccup from the engine. A Canada-Goose however.... will do a damage.

@tar True story about a 747 flying into Anchorage Alaska: The flight crew noticed they were coming up behind an eagle, which was presumably also heading for land, since it had a large fish in its claws. The eagle did notice the plane and decided to take evasive action - which included dropping the fish. After landing, the remains of a 15 pound salmon were found in #2 engine of the 747. Some you win, some you lose!

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text:
Is it possible to interchange different of fuels for turbine engines?
There are a few types of fuel for turbine engines, for example Jet-A, Jet A-1 and Jet-B.
Is it safe / practical to interchange these types of fuel for a generic turbine engine?

Flash point, freezing point... All in that table.

hello there, please do not re-ask questions that are closed by the community; it does not work here. Instead, the closed question should be reworked to be reopened by the community. I side with you that it is not a duplicate, but if enough people disagree, then the question should be edited further to clarify. TL;DR: repeated attempts of the same circumstances is unlikely to result in a different outcome

If we are talking generic turbine engines then the answer is yes. Turbine engines will run on a wide range of fuels, I personally have flown a Military Helicopter, that normally runs on Jet A1 using AVGAS instead. The flight manual limited it to 10 hours of operation on AVGAS. Interestingly the same flight manual had other fuel types listed such as Deisel, and automotive gasoline.
The only difference I noticed on the different fuel was a slightly higher exhaust gas temperature for a given power setting.
Heavy duty industrial turbines are often run off crude oil!

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text:
Are there any pressurized piston-engine aircraft?
Are there any pressurized piston engine-powered aircraft? Or does pressurization require a turboprop or jet?

According to the Piper website, "The Piper M350 is the only current production pressurized piston-engine aircraft available today. It leads the piston pack with an impressive 213 ktas cruising speed, as well as the ability to cruise up to 25,000 ft in pressurized comfort. With standard dual turbochargers, owners can also expect a consistent fuel burn at any altitude keeping operating costs down."

Just a quick summary of a few common ga machines...cessna p210, p337, 340, 414, 421, piper made a navajo p, moony m22, the piper malibu, beech 58p, at least two lancair models...yes, there are many pressurized piston aircraft.

The first pressurized aircraft were piston powered, beginning as early as 1921 with a modified Airco DH.9A containing a pressurized enclosure for the pilot.  Throughout the 20s and 30s, pressurization systems developed in reciprocating powered aircraft with benchmarks like the Lockheed XC-35 being the first pressurized aircraft using bleed air from its super chargers to pressurize the cabin and the Boeing 307, the first pressurized airliner.  World War II saw plenty of pressurized pistons like versions of the BF-109 and the Ju-86, as well as the Boeing B-29.
Postwar airliners were also pressurized.  The Boeing 377, the Douglas DC-6 and the Lockheed Constellation were all good examples of this.  With the introduction of jets, these quietly faded into obscurity.
There are a few pressurized piston single and twins in operation today, though manufacturers did not make very many.
Probably the most successful pressurized single is the Piper PA-46 Malibu series introduced in the 1980s and still in production today, in both the form of the reciprocating PA-46-350 Mirage and the turbine powered PA-46-500 and -600 Meridian.
In the late 70s and early 80s a number of manufacturers attempted to enter the pressurized entry cabin class single engine market.  Cessna offered a Pressurized version of the C-210 Turbo Centurion called the P210 which is no longer produced but still popular with GA pilots today.  Mooney, after finding marginal success with its pressurized M22 Mustang from the 1960s, decided to produce a pressurized six seat cabin class airplane called the Mooney 301.  It was stillborn due to financial pressures from Mooney's new owners but the best technology from it was cannibalized in a ill-fated partnership with Aerospatiale (now Daher Socata) in Tarbes France to produce a single engine turbine airplane which eventually became the TBM-700/-850/-9XX (TBM stands for Tarbes Mooney).
Even a few homebuilt piston singles have been pressurized.  Lancair's IV-P, ES-P, and piston versions of their Evolution are all pressurized and capable of nearly 300 KTAS at FL250.
More piston twins have been pressurized as well.  Cessna produced a pressurized version of the C-337 Skymaster called the P337G, as well as the 340, 414 and 421.  Piper produced the PA-31 Navajo.  Beech produced the BE-60 Duke as well as a variant of the Queen Air called the B88. Rockwell produced the Aero Commander series.

Yes, both the Cessna P210 Centurion and Beechcraft Baron were pressurized from piston-powered engines. Going farther back in history, the B-29 was pressurized before jet-engine (or turboprop) aircraft were in production. So it is entirely possible for piston engines to give pressurized cabins.

In 1940s, the Luftwaffe used the Junkers Ju 86P and Ju86R, turbocharged diesel-powered variants of the Ju86 with extended wingspan and pressurized cabin, that could cruise at heights of 40.000 ft.

In 1973, the pressurized Cessna Skymaster P337G entered production.

There were also a bunch of Cessna twins that were pressurized, like the Cessna 340, 421, and 414.

Piper Malibu and Mooney M22 were single engine pressurized airplanes.

The Beech Baron BE-55 and BE-58 are not pressurized.  The BE-60 Duke, however was.

@CarloFelicione One of the Barons, the 58P, was pressurized, though most weren't. My answer reads as if I was saying they all were, which isn't the case. Your answer to this question is much better.

@xxavier All Bf-109 G and K models with odd numbers added to the version letter (example: 109G-5) were pressurized, the ones with even numbers were not (source).

Piper Aerostar 601P was a pressurized twin.

Some models of the  de Havilland Mosquito, a WW2 era bomber was fitted with a rudimentary pressurised cabin.

It would help if you could flesh out your answer and add some sources.


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How should a helicopter pilot react after V-belt breaking?
I have a question concerning the V-belts of the Robinson R22 (or R44) breaking in-flight. When they break, the rotor RPM will drop and the engine will tend to overspeed. (Is this actually correct?) What are the appropriate actions? I know that I need to flare to get rotor RPM back, but do I also need to close the throttle a bit to reduce engine RPM?

The engine going overspeed is less important than getting to the ground safely.

While this seems like a very valid question to me, my immediate (IANAP) thought is "sounds like someone should be doing a more thorough pre-flight inspection"!

@FreeMan My question did not start with "I feel like skipping pre-flight so...". And thinking that after a thorough inspection you're completely safe might just be as unsafe as not checking.

What triggered my question is that I was reading some V-belt incident/accidents reports and many of them stated that the pilot saw, next to the rotor RPM dropping, the engine RPM at the top of the red line. So I was wondering what I should do for what concerns the engine, apart from making sure that I don't fall like a brick.

Not an answer but if you re sure that the belt is gone (and not something else), you could shut down the engine. Side benefit is that this will focus the pilot's attention only to landing.. (not a serious recommendation!)

sorry, @10a - that wasn't intended to be an attack on you! I do understand that even after an inspection things can fail.

@FreeMan No worries, my answer sounded more defensive as intended ;)

@GürkanÇetin Do you mean fully closing the throttle? Is it best to disable the governor too then? And what if I didn't lose the belt completely?

@10a how could you "not lose the belt completely"? Once it fails such that there is a disconnected rotor and engine speed there is no torque transfer from engine to rotor

@ratchetfreak I mean if one is gone and the second is too stretched out or both are stretched so that they/it slip/s a bit. The rotor is still driven but not enough to maintain RPM. Or is that not a possible situation? But my main question was if both are gone.

I had meant turning off the engine completely (not serious but technically to protect the engine over speed this would work).

Most likely immediately initiate an autorotate descent and make ready for an off field landing, thence shut down and secure the engine.

A number of R22 accident reports indicate that the rotor RPM drops and the engine will tend to overspeed in case of 'V' belt failure. From the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report Reliability of the Robinson R22 helicopter belt drive system:

NTSB occurrence report: LAX92LA034
... pilot reported that the engine RPM indicator suddenly pegged at the top of the gauge and the rotor RPM began rapidly decreasing. ... Examination ... revealed that the forward v-belt was split longitudinally and displaced from the transmission pulleys. The rear belt was found off the engine and transmission pulleys.
CAA occurrence report: 99/23
... there was a bang and the engine ‘revved up’, but power to the main rotor was lost. The power loss to the main rotors was due to broken v-belts.
NTSB occurrence report: NYC08LA043
... , the engine’s RPM sharply  increased and the main rotor RPM alarm sounded. Post-accident examination of the helicopter drive system revealed that the v-belts had rolled off the sheaves
NTSB occurrence report: N993KC
The pilot ... heard a loud ‘bang’. The pilot ... observed the engine RPM was excessively high, the rotor RPM was below 80 percent and the low rotor
RPM warning horn was sounding. The on-scene investigation noted that one of the v-belts to the main rotor drive system had separated,  which caused the other belt to slip off the upper spindle.

In case of suspected belt failure, the pilot is expected to try and make a power on landing while prepared for an autorotative one. From the R-22 Flight Manual:

... if the clutch light flickers or stays on for a longer time than usual,  it can indicate a belt or bearing failure in the vee-belt  drive. If that occurs, immediately pull the  CLUTCH  circuit breaker. Select the closest  safe landing  site and make  a normal power-on landing. Be prepared  to  enter autorotation should failure of the drive system occur. The smell of burning rubber may also indicate an impending belt failure.

Note that there is no talk about the throttle. Though the R22 has two V belts, it is not designed to fly with a single one (though there seems to be some instances of that). My guess is that it is better for the pilot not to tinker with the throttle for two reasons- if the problem is somewhere else, reducing the rpm would have adverse effects and if the belt is indeed gone, it would be better for the pilot to concentrate on saving the people first and the engine later.


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What is the strange object on 737-800 exterior, on the aft right side?
I was unable to locate this on a "real life" picture of the aircraft, so have attached an image from my simulator. What is the function/purpose of this object on the exterior of the 738? It seems like it would decrease efficiency so it must surely serve an important role? Thanks.

On the real aircraft, and while we are here, let's see inside.

That's the right turn arrow.  I fly for miles with those blinking sometimes...

@mins the downward angle of that image is a little unsettling...

Those are the top secret Chemtrail generation port.  BTW its about the size of a womp rat hole...

It's the air inlet for the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU).
Slide 18 here has an image labelled "APU Air Inlet door with Vortex Generator". The inset image on the slide looks almost exactly like your posted image.
I found a much better image here, captioned "Boeing 737-800 with APU inlet".
There is some discussion about why the 737 has vortex generators for the APU on this thread on PPRuNe.


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May time be logged for an aborted flight?
Consider the case where the engine is started, aircraft taxies to the run-up area to do check, then it turns out that a magneto is bad, or there's a radio problem. The pilot wisely decides to abort the flight, and taxies back to parking. In the process, experience has been gained in taxiing, possibly ATC communication, the pre-flight, and good pilot judgement for the flight. There were no take-offs, landings or air time, but the aircraft was under the control of a PIC during taxi.
There's a long discussion about this on PPRuNe, with varying opinions either way.
According to 14 CFR 1.1:

Flight time means:
(1) Pilot time that commences when an aircraft moves under its own
  power for the purpose of flight and ends when the aircraft comes to
  rest after landing; or
(2) For a glider without self-launch capability, pilot time that
  commences when the glider is towed for the purpose of flight and ends
  when the glider comes to rest after landing.

The key phrases seem to be for the purpose of flight (which seems to be satisfied - unless going for a VOR check, or moving the aircraft from one location to another), and after landing (which, doesn't apply, because there was no airborne time).
Have there been any FAA determinations, rulings or enforcement actions made in this regard?

The regulation here is actually really clear, as you said it starts when an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight (start logging time) and ends when it comes to rest after landing (well, as you said you didn't land, but you have to stop logging sometime. The intent is to stop logging when you reach your parking spot and stop moving, so stop when parked on the ramp).  It takes knowledge and skill to taxi an aircraft, sometimes in a very complex environment, and you are responsible for the aircraft during that time (and need to avoid accidents), so it should be logged.

@Lnafziger I disagree that it's really clear. The fact that there have been requests for FAA legal interpretation of this regulation speak to that. The ambiguous part is " comes to rest after landing", which implies a take-off must have been made for the flight to be logged. I agree with @Pondlife that it's an unwritten rule just to log Hobbs time (for rental aircraft), and that the FAA is more concerned with people gaming the system to accrue hours rather than a few minutes here and there taxiing.

I don't see any possible way to interpret the regulation as allowing all hobbs time to be logged, and doing so is in violation of the regulations and should not be promoted.  If you do so, you are falsifying your logbook and could conceivably lose your pilot license.  That being said, I agree that there are people who do it and that they are unlikely to be prosecuted for it, but that does not make it legal or moral.

The rules are clear: if you never landed, you never stop the clock. Keep it running forever!

Interesting question, I found myself in exactly that position a couple of months ago (more on that below).
First, I found an FAA clarification on this, which is a legal interpretation from 2007 and it partly answers your question. The questioner asked the FAA three questions about logging flight time (in a helicopter in this case); questions 1 and 2 are very close to yours. Question 1 is:

May a pilot log as "flight time" to qualify for a certificate or rating under 14 CFR Part 61, or for purposes of qualifying under 14
  CFR 135.243(b)(2), that time accrued in a helicopter when the aircraft
  is sitting on the ground with the engine running and rotor blades
  turning, but the aircraft has not moved from its parking place and
  flight has not yet commenced?

Question 2 is almost the same, but it asks about logging time after parking but when the engine is still running. I know that this is slightly different from your scenario, because you're asking about logging time after the aircraft has moved from its parking place, but the FAA response says the following:

[...] flight time [...] commences the moment that [the aircraft] moves under its
  own power away from its parking place for the purpose of flight -
  whether departure is commenced by lifting off or taxiing.

So according to that interpretation, you can start logging time as soon as you start taxiing but it goes on to say that you cannot log time after the aircraft lands. That means that your question is still a grey area, and if you want a definite answer then you should probably ask the FAA for your own interpretation. But my personal take is that the FAA is only concerned about people trying to cheat the system by sitting with the engine running, and for practical purposes you can log time as soon as you start taxiing.
And turning to the real-world situation, I don't think it matters at all. Every instructor and pilot I have ever met simply logs whatever time the Hobbs says, regardless of what happens in between. The FAA has absolutely no way to accurately verify what you're logging and there's a large degree of trust in the system.
In my case, the AI gyro didn't spin up and although I didn't need that instrument (the planned flight was VFR in CAVU conditions) I elected not to fly anyway: better safe than sorry, and if one thing is broken it may be a symptom of a bigger problem. I taxied back with 0.2 on the Hobbs: I didn't log it (and the FBO didn't charge me). My thinking was simply that I didn't really 'fly' and 0.2 is irrelevant for all practical purposes. I'm sure that someone somewhere has found themselves 0.1 short of what they needed for a rating and really wished that they had that extra time, but if you ever find yourself in that position, it's no big deal to do a couple of turns in the pattern.

Note: there is another FAA interpretation on this, but it looks like it only applies to part 121. They said yes, you can log it, but that's based on the assumption that after you taxi back to the gate, the airline finds a second aircraft and you fly that one to the original destination. They didn't say what happens if the flight is cancelled completely.

Did you placard the AI as INOP?

Regarding the specific heli question, I was taught that since the AFM specifies a minimum crew of 1, that anytime the rotor is turning, a pilot must be at the controls, even if the engine is off and the rotor is being allowed to spin down on its own (instead of using the rotor brake). That means I can log the time (probably a tenth). In practice I use the meter

@rbp If a sticky note is a placard then yes :-) And the FBO sent the aircraft for maintenance immediately too.

Sticky note works! People often forget to do this, but the regs require it.

If I make it to the runup area and have to turn back due to failure, I don't log the "flight" at all.

@voretaq7 pointed out that you only need to placard if it is going to be flown (91.213), but I take the more conservative view that it should be placarded when noticed, so that it isn't returned to service without proper inspection

@Pondlife - Thanks for the response. The interesting take-away here (from the FAA determination) is that the common practice of just using Hobbs time at flight schools would include a little bit of non-loggable time since it includes the time after the engine starts, but before it has rolled forward, and possibly a tad of time at the end after resting, but before being turned off (e.g. for a final mag check, and/or a 121.5 check). After reading the tone of the letter, I'd speculate that the answer to my question, should it be asked, would probably also be a blunt 'no'!

@CJBS yes, exactly. In fact, I would suggest that you don't contact the FAA and rather let sleeping dogs lie ;-)

@Pondlife I wasn't planning on it. I don't need such time for anything anyway, having already got my license. The only benefit I could see by logging such times would be as a record of days of aborted flight (e.g. to show a 3rd party "good judgement" flights). Event that's marginal, though. Number of hours isn't an excellent indicator of 'experience', either way. Who's more experienced: the pilot with 10,000 hours who does (only) the same route every day, or the pilot who's been to varied different airports in different environments with 1000 hours....? ;-)

Looks like perhaps the FAA just copied the Tokyo Convention for definitions.

From the world of Part 121 (airline) aviation, where everything gets approved by the FAA before it goes into the manuals: time starts when brakes are released at the gate & pushback commences, and ends when brakes are set & a door opens. A flight that departs with the intent to go fly, has a problem off the gate, returns to the gate, and is then cancelled absolutely IS logged as block time, and that time counts toward the pilots' max flight time limits. (And yes, pushed back by a tug isn't "under its own power", but since it's how the automatic system works, it's acceptable & accepted.)


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Why are airliner underbellies generally painted differently?
Some airlines, Delta in particular, have dark underbellies on their liveries. Is this only aesthetic or is there a purpose for it?

Perhaps it hides dirt better?

I have heard that it helps the airplane stand out more when looking up at it from below because it contrasts with the sky.  This also applies to looking down at a white aircraft from above where it typically stands out from the ground (unless it is covered in snow. :) ).

Emirates paints its logo on the ventral: http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/frwiki/69/Emirates_A380_2.JPG

Originally (way back before radar) the colors had a practical use for maintaining visual separation between planes, which was done by pilots looking for the other planes with their eyes:
Dark underbelly: Easier to see from below against bright clouds or sky.
Light top-body: Easier to see from above against (typically) dark ground.
The idea being that when you're looking visually for other civilian air traffic (or from the ground) one wants to maximize visibility without losing them in sky glare or ground clutter.
If you look at older military planes you'll often see the exact opposite (dark colors on top and blue on the bottom) because those military planes didn't want to be seen.

It should probably be noted that maintaining visual separation is still very common, especially for VFR traffic. While VFR traffic does typically (but not necessarily) still have at least Mode C transponders, it's perfectly common to fly around without ever even speaking to ATC if you're not in or near controlled airspace. This, of course, is not true for airliners, which generally stay almost exclusively in controlled airspace.

@reirab - Yup, I've done VFR separation and called out 'I have the traffic in sight' many, many times. :)

Aircraft are generally a nice bright white. Aside from the company logo, this leaves the other company colors needing a space. The tail, engine cowlings and underbellies are the more effective places to put it. There is color on the tail, color on the bottom, and the logo in between.

In my opinion, the lower one lifts forward the identity of the company much better.

The 747 in your first picture is an outdoor museum exhibit: it's not at all representative of the condition of commercial airliners.

@DavidRicherby: And on top of that, the dirt on that airplane was certainly not splashed up from the nosewheel. It has the same intensity along the full length of the plane, and it is running down from the windows, probably washed down by rain at wherever the plane is permanently located.

...and that is in Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace in Le Bourget, near Paris.
Wikipedia


text:
Have B-25's and B-26's been converted for private business use?
In the movie Cash McCall, the main character, McCall, owns an aircraft that looks remarkably similar to a B-25 or B-26, but is painted yellow and has no turrets.
Have these aircraft been converted for private business use or were there business aircraft based on the design of WWII bombers?

The question could be improved by editing to make clear whether you are talking about the Martin B-26 Marauder or the Douglas A-26 Invader, later renamed B--26 after the retirement of the Marauder.  Both were converted for use as executive transports (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B-26_Marauder, and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Mark_Marksman) , as was the B-25 (see http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_bombers/b25_31.html ).

IMDB:

McCall's plane is a demilitarized Douglas A-26 Invader, a type used in WWII.

Since the film was made in 1960, I imagine there were plenty of them around.
(The A-26 was known a the B-26 from 1948 to 1965, according to Wikipedia. The B-25 is easily distinguished because it has the twin tail.)

Ah, ok. There were only a few brief scenes with the plane in it, and I couldn't remember what kind of tail it had.

Yes. After World War 2, surplus aircraft were cheap, plentiful, and offered great performance compared to pre-war designs, and many were converted to use as executive transports.
The A-26/B-26 was no exception, being the basis for the On Mark Marksman series. Some of the On Mark conversions involved pretty serious modifications like a new wing spar carrythrough and a new (and much uglier) cockpit.
The B-25, to my knowledge, had no comparable program carried out, but many became water bombers for use in fighting forest fires. There were undoubtedly some executive conversions made as well!
Other types like the Lockheed Hudson/Ventura/Lodestar transports and patrol aircraft were also popular conversion choices.

B-25's were also used for transport after the war (at least for military use, not sure if any were converted specifically to be sold on the civilian market). One of them crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. According to wikipedia some B-25's were converted to VB-25J's for VIP transport.

Several B-25s ended up as camera aircraft for movie studios (and probably other operators), replacing the guns with cameras. And of course more were used as "actors" in war movies.

The aircraft is a modified Douglas A-26 Invader. As mentioned in an earlier reply there were several companies which undertook such work. Most well known was On-Mark Engineering of Van Nuys, CA. The 26 in question, N36B was one of several (at least two used the same reg.) owned by citrus tycoon Willis (Bill) Bailard of Santa Barbara, CA. He had at least three of them over the years. Possibly four. Including an unpressurized On-Mark Marketeer.
This example does not have the ring- spar mod as later versions did, and I suspect that it is an earlier Grand Central exec. version. Note also in the movie that the 26 still has the fittings for the upper turret installed.

I remember Air Spray Ltd., at Red Deer, Alberta, had a highly modified A26 bought from the Mexican government that used to fly around call girls as the interior of the plane had a fully plush white shag carpet everywhere and you could fully stretch out with your hostess. It also had curtained windows in the back area and a bed type platform in the sealed bomb-bay area. It also had an extra long nose cone with a small kneeling shower stall that had heated water pumped from a water tank in the nose section. Just enough for rinsing off. The A26 outside color was white with a nose to tail medium blue stripe half way up and Mexican registration.

Here is a list of surviving B-25 which may provide some references. It looks like Redbull has one that they fly around (arguably for business reasons)

The question leaves it unclear as to whether the "B-26" reference was meant to apply to the Martin B-26 Marauder, or the Douglas A-26 Invader, later renamed B--26 after the retirement of the Marauder.  Both were converted for use as executive transports (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B-26_Marauder , and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Mark_Marksman ), as was the B-25 (see http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_bombers/b25_31.html ).
So, regardless of details, the answer to the title question is "yes".